Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/20

8 from the interference of man and the workings of Nature plus such interference—in a word, of the cosmic and the ethical—has to be insisted on. Nature has achieved certain results, though by slow, blundering, and (Montesquieu notwithstanding) extravagantly wasteful methods. Her processes, however, with all their, to us, ruthless cruelty and prodigality, have, in the rough average of cases, made for what—rather metaphorically, perhaps—Mr. Spencer has called "fullness of life"; and such increasing fullness of life may therefore be described—to borrow a teleological phrase, though I do not myself accept the teleological implication—as the "end" of evolution. And here it is that reason steps in and seeks, within the limits everlastingly imposed by cosmic conditions, to find means helping to the same great "end"—now a true rational end—which, while at least as effective as the methods employed by Nature, shall be no longer characterized by what in the "acquired dialect of morals" (to use Huxley's phrase) we have learned to call Nature's indifference and brutality. Man, then, by reason of his intelligence, has great power of tampering with the cosmic order; and how far it is wise to do this and just where the proper compromises have to be made remain to-day among the most difficult of the social problems which we have to face, though in view of the foregoing discussion we may lay it down as a general principle that the ethical process should be allowed to interfere with the cosmic process only when the "end" aforesaid may be more adequately, perfectly, and economically secured thereby. At any rate, we must admit that Goethe was right when he said that it is man's privilege to "distinguish, elect, and direct," and Arnold when he wrote, "Man must begin, know this, where Nature ends."

Returning from this digression, we will consider for a moment the evolution of the moral code as above defined.

When I described the earlier and outward regulative codes of conduct as pre-ethical codes I did not simply mean that in the sequence of human affairs they actually came before the moral code itself. The relationship is closer and more vital than such a statement would imply. My full meaning is that the pre-ethical codes have all along combined to establish and maintain the social conditions, in the absence of which no observations of cause and effect in conduct could have been made and registered—in the absence of which, therefore, the moral criterion strictly so called would never have arisen. As out of the primordial ceremonial code arose the codes we call religious and political, so out of these combined has gradually emerged and differentiated the moral code proper, as with that consolidation of social life to